Lot's of members ask occasionally "how SEO friendly Drupal is", "which is more SEO friendly CMS Drupal Joomla or Wordpress" Who is more SEO friendly? Let's first discuss about who is more SEO friendly CMS. What is SEO friendly means for a CMS? SEO is a broad term, but for any CMS, SEO friendly means it offers all the goodies to do on page SEO either built in or as modules. Off page SEO isn't responsibility of CMS, you have to do that your self. believe me, no matter how SEO friendly others are but drupal would blow them away. It has every thing that you would expect from a CMS. What do you expect from a SEO friendly CMS? SEO experts, please comment on what are the main components of on page optimization. I am not an SEO (I am a enterprise J2EE developer) but I would say onpage optimization would expect any CMS to provide following features. SEO friendly URLS Ability to control URLs and specify your own URLs for content Ability to control and specify page title for every page Ability to provide meta tags for every page Good navigation structure Structured and semantic HTML output Ability to prevent duplicate contents, automatic sitemap and robots.txt generation (if you wish) Speed Comment if you wish any other features. Drupal has all this and much more, now its your turn to decide weather drupal is SEO friendly or not Doing better SEO with Drupal I will explain how to achieve every thing explained in above list and what modules you will need for that. Path module This module comes built in with drupal it allows users to rename URLs. you can have any URL you wish. This module is used to create SEO friendly URLs Path auto Path auto is another very useful contributed module, it can automatically generate SEO friendly URL aliases for content pages. Page title Page title module gives ability to specify titles for content pages, home page, and category pages. Use this module to specify the titles you want for your pages. Auto node title Gives ability to generate page title automatically using some pattern. Very useful when pages are created by users because users wouldn't enter proper title for the page they create. Node words Allows you to specify meta tags like description, keywords, canonical url, and many more for each page. Global redirect Helps preventing duplicate content. Global redirect checks the current URL for an alias and does a 301 redirect to it if it is not being used. Path redirect Path redirect module allows you to specify a redirect from one path to another path or an external URL. XML site map Used to automatically create sitemap. Robotstxt This module generates the robots.txt file dynamically and gives you the chance to edit it, on a per-site basis, from the web UI. Another recommended modules - SEO checklist - SEO friend Also see my another thread Drupal vs Joomla
Drupal by itself gives all the tools you need to be SEO-friendly. But make sure you picked a SEO friendly Theme. Some 3rd-party Themes are not very SEO-friendly `coz of poor layout.
this is great, wish you posted this before i did everything you have listed here, I had to figure it out for myself
Excellent post. I agree with most everything, except i'm not sure the NodeWords module helps very much.